


i'm only here to witness the remains of loving you

by forcynics



Series: holiday fic 2011 [5]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-07
Updated: 2011-12-07
Packaged: 2018-05-24 00:44:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6135624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/forcynics/pseuds/forcynics
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He is never supposed to fall for her – was never supposed to fall for any of them, but fails in that rather spectacularly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	i'm only here to witness the remains of loving you

Tatia is a slow enchantment, one that catches him unawares.

He is never supposed to fall for her – was never supposed to fall for any of them, but fails in that rather spectacularly. Tatia is so subtle, though, always toeing the line between adhering to the rules and breaking them as long as no one is watching. She is new, completely unfamiliar territory, and neither of her dopplegangrs should later be able to claim that much, but somehow they prove strangely reminiscent of her in this way, so good at knocking him off his feet.

Tatia does it best, though.

He is never supposed to fall for her, but he isn’t able to prevent it either, not when she shoots him secretive grins and tangles her fingers in his even when there are other people around them – all it would take was one shifted gaze, but she only ever laughs at the way he worries. She laughs when she has everything to lose, and that is one thing (of many) that Elijah can never understand.

Tatia’s descendants turn out to be good at that too, always hovering just out of the way of all his preconceived notions.

He is never supposed to fall for her, but he does, and then he loses her. Elijah eventually learns to bury the pain of it all, numbs the grief and wishes uselessly that the dopplegangr would share the face of anyone else, because he does not want Tatia again, does not want to see her embodied in some other girl. But even so, there is something desperate clawing under his skin when he imagines it, and as much as he does not want to come face to face with a reincarnation of Tatia, he is all but counting down the years.

*

Katerina is sudden, a pang of repressed longing that transfers itself immediately to such a familiar face.

He is helpless against her from the first moment he sees her, Tatia reborn. She is identical, an exact copy of the girl he loved five hundred years ago and no amount of preparing to wall himself off against her is useful in the end. Her face alone draws him in, but there is more to it; he somehow allows there to be more, but how he could not?

Katerina, aside from the face she wears, is like no other girl he has ever known.

He is helpless against her familiarity but he soon grows helpless against her own charms as well. She is bold, speaking her thoughts as they come to her; she is utterly enticing, with mischievous grins and sparkling eyes; and she looks at him sometimes as if she is trying to fathom him out. He pulls away, tries to push distance between them before he lets anything slip out, before she can tear apart the numbness he has constructed so well.

Katerina’s dopplegangr will prove to look at him the same way, to the same effect, and he curses them both.

He is helpless against her, and it is because of this that he cannot allow her to die, tries to save her. He is not supposed to care; she is supposed to be a means to an end that he and his brother have been working towards for five centuries. But Katerina stares at him and speaks softly of love, prods dangerously at emotions he has hidden away, and he falls for her just as hard, just as quickly, as if all his desire not to only propels him forward. And then she flees, turns herself and runs away, and Elijah spends five hundred years positive that she was the only girl in the world who would ever wear that face again.

*

Elena shocks him from the first moment he lays eyes on her, because Elena was never supposed to exist.

He does not understand how a human girl could have that face when Katerina was the last of her line. He is not used to being so surprised, and he almost lurches when he sees her, because she is so impossible. But when he draws closer, breathes in the scent of her blood and hears her heart beating quick quick quick in her chest, he cannot deny it either. She is real. Somehow, there is another one; it has been a thousand years but he is cursed to see her over and over again. This time, though, he has sealed away any lingering emotion, and does not allow himself to view Elena as anything more than a tool.

Elena, in true Petrova fashion, does not waste time before testing just how good that seal is.

He does not understand how she stands up to him so seemingly unafraid, negotiates with him well aware that she is arguing for her own death. Her concern for her friends and family, that is the key; it trumps even her concern for herself, and he marvels at that. He wonders if she is truly so selfless or if she gets some sort of pleasure in donning the martyr role – if it is all an effort to draw a firm line between herself and the other girls who have looked like her. He cannot decide if she accomplishes it or not.

Elena is both nothing and everything like Tatia and Katerina.

He does not understand how she manages it. She proves herself to be manipulative, displays Katherine’s same ruthless capability of doing whatever needs to be done, though Elena acts in the defence of others as well. She smiles sometimes – not at him, no, but rather at either Salvatore – and her eyes have the same inviting promise of Tatia, the same quality that would make a man do anything for her. And Elijah sees the way the Salvatores look at her, watches them defend her, and knows they are wrapped up in her as fully as he ever was in Tatia or Katerina – or indeed, Elena herself. She is an apparition of the girl they loved, and the girls he loved, an embodiment of so much history that it draws so many to her. It is her tragedy and her asset all at once. But while she wears the face of girls before, there is an empathy in her that stirs what he has repressed for so long, and hopelessly, he thinks that he does not want harm to come to this girl either.

Where his love for Tatia was youthful and overwhelming, and his love for Katerina an awed, desperate longing, it is his love for Elena – a bewildered need to understand every inch of her, an irrepressible desire to feel emotions he hasn’t wanted to allow himself in a millennium – that Elijah thinks he would bet on, if he were a betting man.

Or if he were a man who still believed that love meant anything at all.


End file.
